The toughest person ever named Kelly

Kelly Pavlik now is officially the toughest person ever named Kelly, and that includes Leroy Kelly, Pat Kelly, Jim Kelly, R. Kelly and Kelly Swanson. Here's some coverage by BWAA journalists of an amazing night in Atlantic City:

Joe Maxse, Cleveland Plain-Dealer: "Power-puncher Pavlik prevails"

Tim Smith, New York Daily News: "Kelly Pavlik KOs Jermain Taylor in seventh"

Dan Rafael, ESPN.com: "Pavlik gets off floor,knocks out Taylor, wins middleweight title"

Dave Weinberg, The Press of Atlantic City: "Pavlik shocks Taylor with 7th-round KO"

Tim Struby, ESPN The Magazine: "Pavlik-Taylor just the beginning of exciting autumn"

Don Steinberg, Philadelphia Inquirer: "Pavlik, down but not out, scores KO"

Lem Satterfield, Los Angeles Times: "Pavlik stops Taylor to win middleweight titles"

Tom Gerbasi, Maxboxing.com: "A star is crowned as Pavlik stops Taylor in seven"

George Kimball, Boxingtalk.com: "Pavlik pummels Taylor for middleweight crown"

Keith Idec, Herald News: "One-handed, Sheika scores TKO victory" and "Paterson's Pierson gets fifth-round win"

Jermain and Kelly's Class Reunion

Quick, get slugger Kelly Pavlik in the ring with Jermain Taylor. We need a guy who won't run away from Taylor, clinch Taylor, be smaller than Taylor, cover up too much, or otherwise make Taylor look bad and make a world middleweight title fight seem like a good time to change the channel.

Dan Rafael at ESPN.com dredges up fading memories of the only previous time Pavlik met Taylor, in the opening round of trials for the 2000 Olympics. Taylor was 22. Pavlik was 17. Taylor won. Neither boxer remembers anything about it. Manager Cameron Dunkin, who was looking at Pavlik at the time and seems to remember it best, tells Rafael: "I had seen Jermain knocking guys out with the right hand in the amateurs, beating guys up and bullying a lot of guys. He didn't do that with Kelly."

John Cotey in the St. Petersburg Times does a great piece comparing Taylor's recent ring action to a college football season (with a funny line about recent opponents being division I-AA). In the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Joe Maxse takes readers inside Team Pavlik with a nice little main story about Pavlik's ring skills and a big box of fun facts (hobbies: darts and golf). In Taylor's hometown paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Chris Givens has a report on Jermain from his training camp in the Poconos. Bernard Fernandez in the Philadelphia Daily News reports from the Poconos too. The Philadelphia Inquirer with its fancy-pants new web site has a piece (by me) about Taylor's recent lack of flash.

A New Book from Tom Hauser

It's a treat whenever Secondsout.com posts a new column about boxing by Tom Hauser. Once every year or so, when those columns are compiled into book, it's a treasure.

The Greatest Sport of All: An Inside Look at Another Year in Boxing (University of Arkansas Press paperback, $19.95) anthologizes everything Hauser wrote about boxing in 2006, including two pieces that won BWAA Barney awards (“Pay-Per-View Piracy And The Internet,” and “The Opponent.") Most of this stuff is available online, but having it in book form is so much more convenient and far cooler to display on your shelf.

Hauser's pieces are called columns, but that's selling them short. In today's sports media, it often seems like getting to the top requires a journalist to have an opinion first and the facts second. With a few exceptions, Hauser's columns aren't about his opinions. They aren't filled with self-references, cagey prose and hilarious jokes. They're actually features and investigative stories, disguised as columns.

Hauser gets the details. In “Manny Pacquiao: Where's the Money Going?” he meticulously breaks down how the numbers added up (and subtracted down) after a so-called $2 million purse netted Pacquiao $313,446. Hauser's looks at pay-per-view piracy and a night in the life of a professional opponent similarly go deep behind the scenes. His profile of Richard Schaefer gets past the Golden Boy executive's mannered front to show the personality that took him from banking to boxing. “Don King at 75,” a compilation of comments by and about King, could serve as a eulogy.

Yes, Hauser enjoys working conditions that any newspaper reporter would envy. His deadlines are loose compared to the daily grind, and editors don't measure the quality of his stories by how far under 25 inches he can keep them. Still, he makes the most of his medium. This year's book is especially interesting to boxing writers because it contains profiles of boxing media people: Tim Smith, Dan Rafael, Steve Farhood, and Steve Albert. The other pieces just serve as lessons to writers. In some instances, the reporting makes it hard to read them to their completion -- halfway through, you get inspired to go out and try reporting a story of your own so thoroughly.

News links: Joe Maxse in the Cleveland Plain Dealer tees up an advance of the Jermain Taylor - Kelly Pavlik fight. In the San Antonio Express, John Whisler laments the absence of top notch boxing promotion in that city. A story in the Boston Herald explaisn that "Channel 5 sports dude Bob Halloran has signed on as a technical consultant for the Mark Wahlberg-Brad Pitt flick The Fighter, now that his book about boxer “Irish” Micky Ward is just about to hit bookstores."

Ali on GQ cover and other news highlights

To me, any excuse is fine to put a young Muhammad Ali on a magazine cover. It's a no-lose situation. For its October issue, celebrating its 50th anniversary, GQ has made Ali one of 10 different collectible cover subjects. Each cover features one of the "50 Most Stylish Men of the Past 50 Years." They include -- stop me when you see a name that doesn't seem to belong -- Ali, JFK, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Tom Brady. I'm not sure how Brady snuck in there. Let's assume it's because he's impregnated Bridget Moynahan.

The issue is a gigantic 472 pages -- the masthead doesn't even appear until page 100 --and it's hard to find whatever they wrote about Ali. Fashionwise, the image of Ali that comes to my mind has him in a 1970s print shirt with a big pointy collar, made of some fabric that isn't cotton. But the inside Ali photo, accompanied by a very short essay on him -- ah, here it is on page 971,312 -- has him looking sharp in a 1960s black suit, with a white shirt and skinny black tie.

Moving on: Oscar De La Hoya has responded to some weird photos that emerged on the Internet this week showing his head on a body posing in fishnet stockings. He says the pictures are fake.

In real boxing news, Tim Smith did a nice report in the New York Daily News about a new book about early black boxers. Bernie Fernandez in the Philadelphia Daily News has Bernard Hopkins riffing on fighting overseas. At ESPN.com, Dan Rafael's weekend notebook offers his usual tasty tidbits, on Taylor-Pavlik, Calzaghe-Kessler, The Contender, Zab Judah and more. Also at ESPN.com I have a piece about a boxing statistic I invented called the Tyson Index, which measures the percentage of scheduled rounds that a boxer fights as a crude way to measure the excitement of his fights.

De La Hoya Plays Rupert Murdoch, Buys The Ring

Shocker! Everyone seems happy that The Ring has a new chance to thrive -- and scared about what new owner Oscar De La Hoya will do with it. A promoter owning The Bible of Boxing? Still, despite concerns, no one doubts that editors Nigel Collins and Joe Santoliquito and publisher Stu Saks are stand-up guys who will print whatever makes sense to print in the magazine.

"The Ring, led by Collins, has worked feverishly to gain acceptance of its rankings and championship belts. If even a hint of impropriety was suspected, the entire program would go out the window," points out Michael Swann at 15rounds.com.

In my story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which ran in the business section today (it was a busy Philly sports night in which the Phillies scored 13 times and the sad Eagles scored just 12), the strongest statement of the problem came from rival promoter Lou DiBella, who seemed to sum up the unspoken feelings of the other promoters:

"There's conflict of interest all over the place. It takes what's been called 'The Bible of Boxing' and puts it under the ownership of a player who's trying to dominate the business. If you're a rival company to Golden Boy, would you want [Ring's] ratings being used by television networks to determine what they buy? There's too much inherent conflict. And if I owned Ring magazine, and I'm a promoter, I certainly would go to a fighter and say, 'Look, I own Ring magazine.' "

Oscar told me, as he has said to everyone, that Golden Boy won't exert any kind of influence over the editorial choices in the magazine. He said he just wants the magazine to be more mainstream, more like Golf Digest. I warned him just don't make it like Oprah and put himself on the cover every week. The O is taken already anyway.

Here's the press release from Golden Boy.